To keep the fear and lockdown measures justified.
Just like "we don't know if vaccines affect transmission" or "masks work to mitigate the spread" (as if masks were discovered in 2020)
Just like "we don't know if vaccines affect transmission" or "masks work to mitigate the spread" (as if masks were discovered in 2020)
Both your, and my theories hav little predictive or explanatory power.
And if we're dealing with anecdotes, I can also cite that I know people who were not afraid to be going to crowded bars (Check out central California, if you want to see people flouting lockdown, and spending their stimulus checks on partying in, say, Modesto) over the past ~year, despite not being vaccinated. Do you think those people may have been influenced by the media pushing a narrative that lockdowns are unnecessary?
Here's the actual answer to this dilemma. 'The media' is pushing both narratives. You are just paying more attention to one of them, because that's the one you happen to disagree with. There are very few issues where 'the media' boogieman presents a unified front, and COVID-19 has not been one of them.
Could just be that it was to help swing a election, or allowed them to paint certain parties as "anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists". Maybe it's to cover-up nighttime movements by a secretive alien invasion force. Maybe they just love what it's doing to the stock market. Perhaps it's a bold move by online retailers to kill off small businesses or just brick and mortar ones. Maybe they're desensitizing us for something bigger. Maybe they're just incompetent AF and following along with what the media makes them think is what the people want. Maybe it's all ad-click and media-consumption driven as one of the other posters put it.
My personal take is that they have no clue, and most of those in power are just doing things that have been done before and doing them only in ways that have been done previously.
To avoid protests that annoy it and could challenge it in the next elections. All Europe locked down last spring, but there is an accusation that France’s lockdown was unusually strict because that way Macron's government could, at the stroke of a pen, get rid of the Yellow Vests movement that had been so obnoxious over the preceding months. Meanwhile, in Russia it is clear that social-distancing laws are being used as one more tool against gatherings that the regime doesn’t like (while pro-regime gatherings might go ahead unhindered with zero masks or distancing).
They serve the exact same role they did at the start. If we'd open stadiums now the exact same thing will happen, that happened 1 year ago.
Lockdowns will continue until we either reach herd immunity naturally or through vaccines or we have a treatment/mitigation for the disease.
Your conclusions don't match reality. States like Florida have open stadiums and are fairing the same as states like California that insist on totalitarian overreach.
With the exact same density as before ?
I won't say with confidence that a short, hard, lockdown would have solved things in the us, but such approaches did work in many other nations.
And "hundreds of thousands of Euros?" That's a pittance. There has to be more to be made (than maybe enough to buy a studio apartment in Berlin) in order to justify the shutdown of a large part of world industry.
Ok, they make money from selling masks. But do you really think no shareholders in hotel chains, airlines, airports, etc. are trying to push back against that?
Covid is hurting a ton of businesses. A lot of powerful people are behind those businesses that feel that pain.